Facebook Birthdays, Selfishness, The Spacetime/Lovetime Continuum, and Death Stalking

Well, I do believe we will kick this off with birthdays and keep it in order.  Maybe not entirely, but we'll give it a shot.

Birthdays are great most of the time.  Essentially it's like having a second New Year celebration, unless your birthday falls on New Year's day.  It's kind of cool that certain days be claimed.  Certain should be claimed.  There are so many of them you have to devote to being part of society it's cool that you can have your own and it's pretty interesting that there are days claimed of themselves where you, as a person, are forced to look up and away from everyone else and recognize that you are all just people and as such part of a single entity (country, nation, religion, belief, or just part of a grander scale of bodies in space rotating, dying off, being born, at a regular and calculable, to a mind demolishing degree, [God bless the collective scientific mind] interval).

When you are small, birthdays are celebrated.  When you get older, birthdays are celebrated.  Good grief I'm already trying to think of a macro I can program to type birthdays.  Let's call them bdays.  It's nearly as fatiguing to type as it is to read.  Where were we, as you get older bdays are celebrated.  Eventually, I think because of the enormous obstacle of longevity ... didn't the average age for death expand massively from like 35 to 65 in a stretch of helter skelter centuries?  Or was it a handful of decades less than a century ... cannot remember the history lessons exactly, but the obstacle of longevity was overcome on a large scale like feeling the X-1 break the sound barrier over a soundtrack stretched out over a week with rumbling bass against the soles of your feet instead of over a fraction of a second.  Are you seeing it?  The soundtrack of the first sonic boom, to scale it perhaps better and with greater accuracy, over a few days instead of a fraction of a few seconds of silence and then THWOOM!

Suddenly people weren't dying when they were supposed to.  The celebration of birthdays continued because you never knew.  Someone, many someones, were still dying viciously early.  If you made it beyond a certain age the birthday party would become a routine thing, but then you still didn't live that long and everyone else knew it even if you didn't so the birthday party would retain significance throughout much of your life because if you made it beyond the beginning the end was not that far away.  The space/time continuum of your existence was a fairly small swatch of fabric in a quilt of human lives demanding not only close contact, close ties.  The bday continued.  The swatches grew larger.

To present day.  I will not bore you with compartmentalized electro society and the kindness of strangers and asynchronous communication.  We're all on the same page, on the same planet, at the same time.  Birthdays are a lot less significant.  The stretch of life between birth and death has become a sea of time and space instead of a droplet.  Living to age five was awesome.  Living to 10 was nearly a miracle.  And on and on until you died at the ripe and tender age of 45 by incurable infection or bodily injury of one sort or another.  Fast forward and communal life ends at 18.  At the most.  If you decide to or are pushed to it ends four years after that.  Same cycle, larger scale.

If you make it to 13 everyone pretty much backs off and says "alright, this one should make it a good stretch."  Birthday parties every year until 13.  Then a few makes and misses.  Things may come up in the schedule or life barring them.  It's fine.  It's no big deal  Essentially you don't need to have another birthday party until you are about to die, but we've been having parties for so many years for so long before because you weren't out of the woods until you were 20 and then at 20 the parties tapered off until 40 when everyone knew you were probably going to drop dead soon and then they came back with a vengeance.   So we still try to have parties through the teens until 20.  We set an arbitrary mark at 20.  Twenty is when you are officially your own problem.  If you want to kill yourself afterwards, no one will blame you.  If anything they'll blame themselves for somehow screwing up a gestation period of 20 years.  Not that it's not impossible to screw up.  I've seen it happen and those people should blame themselves.  Moving on though: after 20.

After 20 the people throwing you parties are the people in that middle ground where it is so ingrained that every step must be a party because every step has been a bday party in the past back when the scale was all shrunk up.  Those people are throwing you parties because people threw them parties and the people they learned to throw parties from had parties thrown for them all the way back to when that party was also a wedding ceremony because you only had a solid 20 ahead of you to try to get a family going before you were killed by a hoof to the face trying to the milk the cow that morning and forgot to warm up your hands first because the whooping cough all night really took you off your morning game.  The parties are meaningless.  They try to flavor them up with "hey, you can drink now" but you could drink before, it was just a little bit harder.

Fast forward to the mid twenties and the only people still celebrating birthdays as celebrations instead of acknowledgements are the people still looking back to when birthdays meant something and desiring to keep them alive as an active denial that the space/time fabric is growing and much faster than originally supposed or hinted at by the people who celebrated your birthdays as iconic moments in everyone you've ever known (it really was everyone you ever knew because your swatch of fabric was very small when you were small too) and sometimes everyone they knew too's lives.  The fabric continues to stretch.  The stretch grows beyond the realm of sight.

The only way you know there is anything out there is if there is a thread you are holding or if the person units and units away is managing to vibrate space and time on your plane and at your level of harmonic excitement.  For all you know they are vibrating as hard as they can, however your lack of synchronized or harmonic phase or anything close to it to at least cause distortion to be investigated further and at most cause perfect reception is obliterating all abilities of detection.  Your birthday strikes.

You jump up and down on your birthday signal and there is one, two, ten harmonies where there were few before.  Not as many as you were young and not as many as when you will be close to death.  You are excited on your enormous swatch of space and time and communicate back.  Quickly though, you realize the distance is so great that nothing you say will bear any significance to the senders.  By the time it arrives much has changed and will continue to change at a fair rate, but absolutely quickly enough that keeping up will be virtually impossible and an occupation unto it's own.  The space/time is so bloated it is enough only to know that you exist in a sea of existence.  The birthdays must be celebrated though!  Every last one of them!

Though, nothing more.  Wholeheartedly, every last birthday must be celebrated, but please do not be upset if you do not receive a facebook birthday message.  It's nothing personal.  It is not selfish.  It is not "well I sent him one and he didn't send me one back so we're not friends anymore and if he sends me one I'm not going to send him one back" ... like no.  Don't be that.  That's trite.

The fabric of the Spacetime/Lovetime continuum is such:  fractal in portions and quilt in others all flexed over a membrane of space/time.  I remember you.  You remember me.  When was the last time we spoke?  A lot has changed since then.  We met each other during core formations.  If we're friends, there's something we liked when we looked at each other then.  Everything that's happened since then has been a branch or tree or fork or formation of adaptations and evolutions and events since then.  If I liked you then I'll probably like you now, but I may need to trace back a little bit to understand the face I'm looking at now.  Within you and myself.  That affinity will still be there.  Fractal.  Some parts are still quilt.  Have not changed at all, only grown larger and harder to see across.  Accentuated, in some respects conflated, but all there as it was when it was 20 and believing death was around the corner because birthdays are a big effing deal, yeah!?

Some sections remain as quilt.  All of relative directions are the same.  My relationship is the same.  My relationship to those directions remain the same as my portion of spacetime/lovetime expands.  The way that I will engage is across signals and waves that no longer ripple the shores of what used to be square plots.  Now they are jagged and hooked and crystaline.  "Why did you not wish me a happy birthday?  I leapt with all of my might to shake the webs and graphs.  I burned out my transmitter dish and everyone answered.  Why didn't you?"  I am bleeding in, but that's alright.  I will take in for a moment: my fractal development has not reached with the same fervor or life that others around me have grown.  Their swatches have been broken apart with year to year modification, willing and driven, while mine, willing and driven as well have been outpaced by the shear stretch of space/time, around which spacetime/lovetime is beholden.

"Why did you not wish me a happy birthday on facebook or in real time?"  Part of the reason is that you know, roughly, where I am, across the stretch.  Is you vibrate hard enough, I will pick it up.  If I vibrate as hard as I can, it will be picked up, maybe, and defuse.  More than that, the additional complications of your growth will require a degree of decoding to whom you also vibrate and I hate being explained.  Also, the time that I am existing in is the same time as the last time we saw each other and spent time together for a very heavy degree.  The characteristics, for all the stationary portion of quilt knows, being referenced, lauded, and celebrated, have very little to do with the current you and in fact may be portions so far back in the space and time we both occupied that they may be abhorred by the current continued people synchronized and harmonizing with your spacetime/lovetime.

I really do hope it does not come across selfish.  It's anything but that.  Who wants a person several iterations behind the rest of their peers appearing on their timeline without any warning beyond the blind celebrations, appearing ne'er before nor after, popping their head in the door to yell at them to live their lives to the fullest or drop a witt or a jab and zip away.   Or message them about a part of their life so incredibly irrelevant that .... well, you get the picture.  If anything, whatever comes of announcing your birthday on facebook is enjoyable.  I used to try to wish a happy birthday to every single person I actually met in person whose notification came up, but I realized I was just diluting the pool of communications they should be receiving and that's far more important than reciprocation.  Reception is a lot more valuable from stationary (as time and space grows and complications continue to thrive [wives, husbands, children, careers, mobilization, freedoms] the unstoppable movement toward greater complication reduces drastically the stationary ability to receive).  Projection, the opposite value shift.  There is no selfishness.  The relationship is appropriate and beneficial and also removes discomfort in bringing out the telescope that can pierce space/time to see a time capsule floating in square space and see from where the current coordinates came.

Since having the birthday though, I've been consumed with thoughts of aging.  Once the party faded, I was struck, over a morning cup of tea, that from here on out, maybe for a few years more there will be time to improve upon my frame, from here on out the best I can do is ward against sudden physical catastrophic failure.  The brain is it's own beast and will be susceptible to its own sudden failures, the much more important part of the aspects of being to protect the muscle and bones.  That prospect is frightening.

I am very quickly approaching the tipping point of being able to self destruct on purpose will be more difficult than waiting for an accidental failure or fault in the normal operation.  The idea that I will start to have to approach my body each day as an explosive device that requires constant disarming instead of as a device I must operate that is occasionally exceptionally demanding to pilot and often prone to conditions that lead to explosions or other massive exothermic failure is a tad frightening.  It's difficult to frame or explain, I will attempt.

My expected life span is 60 to 70 years.  I assume some of the rage inside of me will drive me another decade.  Perhaps reflection will drive me another five.  Desperation could drive me another five and hate could bring me across the finish line at angry, lucid, "where are my !@#$ing hover cars" 100 in the, of course, mind blowing year 2085, yelling at my robot nurse who simply amps my morphine and changes the channel to the meme network that just plays meme generator failures in fastforward with nature wide lens porn shots sprinkled in between and every now and then the base thumper strapped to the base of my skull goes off with a brief thud.

60 is the target with full apparatus to choice.  If I ever lose the ability to choose whether I live or die, put me down.  If I end up in solitary confinement I'll eventually find a way to kill myself.  You're virtually dead.  Just waiting for space to catch up with time as you've been, shall we say, fast forwarded.  Part of why... okay, I'm getting ahead of myself.  Collect.  Rewind.  Go.

Passing my 30th birthday I realized my body will likely begin, or begin the process of shut down, that will lead to death three to four to five decades from now.  Time flies.  As I sipped my morning die and blew the steam off the top of it and checked up on the news and weather and sports box scores it hit me that some piece of my body my fail at a moments notice in the coming years and perhaps less than that.  It was tremendously frightening.  I was afraid to go to work.  I work alone and have preferred to work alone for many years now.  Suddenly working alone comes with added risks that will compound as time progresses.  If you fall off of a ladder or spear yourself with a section of pipe because that muscle group or nerve system or other simply failed to respond to your intent you will have little to know time to call for help or bring or drag your frame to safety or at least the possibility of survival.  Suddenly your chances of surviving that car accident or freak mechanical accident symptomatic of daily engagement with machines (the more you fly the more likely it is there will be an air catastrophe, but you can't be struck by a bolt out of the blue if you're thirty feet below ground) go down dramatically as you become more frail and susceptible.  That's 100% out of your control

is what I realized.  You cannot suddenly begin hiding inside of a padded safe with provisions and a supply of oxygen.  Everyone dies.  You will more than likely or at least even odds buy the farm by no fault of your own as much as genetics or intent or negligence once you pass 30.  Every day you leave your house with a little less ability is one day slightly more dangerous than the last.  So you will work yourself ragged to try to keep that fraction at zero, even Stevens.  Every morning it will slip a little bit and you have to do a little bit more to push the numerator back over the denominator.  It'll work for a while.  In some cases a good long while until the growth in the denominator comes too fast and too regularly pinging and updating.  When your body let's go, you can still just brute force the math and bend your own time and space to whatever you want to imagine it to be.  The only reason why it will flex is because other people are leaping up and down and the fabric itself has grown so thin it can be distorted through pure force of will from either end of the spectrum of passions love and hate.  Until the stitches sewn when you were born finally snap and every one on facebook wishes you a farewell.

I did get wrapped up in the narrative for a bit, you see why bridging 30 and taking time to throw a few stones skipped on the river is important to me.  I'm not upset.  I'm in love and scared and aware and dreaming all at once and I never want to leave that bridge.  I haven't forgotten you.  For many, though, it is true, I can be spoken with or to, but I cannot speak to you.  On my birthdays I am reminded.

Let's put some Christmas lights on that.



///Kiln - "The Colorfreak"   far enough away from aphex to call it's own

Dear (_____)

Dear parents,

As your little ones get older and the topic comes of what they want to be when they grow up and they say "garbage man" or something and you go "pfffffft, honey, you'll never believe what junior said," remember that.  If it stays the same through the years after you've introduced him or her to the world at large, maybe just help him become a trash man instead of a world renowned master of ... I dunno ... finance?  Imagine a world where some of the greatest minds and talents were not diverted into colossal shadows and instead tended what has become blighted and a bit ruined by - lack.  Imagination will thrive wherever planted.  Genius does not stop being genius because it's bottles and cans, pots and pans, instead of charts, diagrams, papers, paints, and appointments.

That Instant

You realize you have an additional gears in your gearbox that you've been using that you thought were some sort of malfunction, and you also realize you have no idea how to get to them regularly enough to learn how to use them.

That Instant

you know the quote "...have a heart..." from Miller's Crossing can be spun well and driven into a new one that reads "...have a heart... have a heart... look inside and have an unbreakable heart..."  with the same theme of desperation about it, only turned up by a degree and it works better in a different movie with a similar, but not too dissimilar, end.

Dear (_____)

Dear rage,

you have never treated me well.  Over the years or the moments. Some say you can be shed with meditation or prayer.  Some say you can be shed with practice of sorts.  Can I say none of those soothe sayers have known rage in its most easily digestible, most accessible, most virulent form?

Sincerely,

a lover

That Instant

you realize your desk weighs 250 lbs by itself, not counting the cinder blocks its on top of, and flipping it is not an option and you realize you have to find another way to breathe and regret a little bit building your desk out of a standing piano.  Nix!

Dear (_____)

Dear plumbing,

I know if I get you wrong I will likely have a natural gas explosion on our hands.  It won't be your fault.  It will be my fault.  As much as I like to have a possible "whoopsie daisy" sprouting up in my field of action, I know I cannot afford one.  As much as you do not enjoy being exploded, I enjoy it less, times ten, possibly more.  Let's get it right and keep our record spotless.

Sincerely,

your tradesman